I am beginning to wonder if I will ever get all of my short stories/fics up without a lot of reposting. If we could just stay on one board for a while, maybe it could happen.

As usual, I'm starting with the short stories. However you guys are getting a break. I'm going to post all 3 of my short stories at once. Now here we go...

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Sabrina's Sorrow

It was a normal fall day at the Indigo Plateau. The Gym Leaders and the Elites, who were more like six than four, were having their normal annual reunion. Once again Sabrina sat to herself, avoiding contact with the others at all costs.

"They're not my real friends. They only act like I'm their friend because I'm a Gym Leader. None of them are true friends." she said to herself. Meanwhile some of the others were talking to themselves.

"Poor Sabrina. Why does she come to these things anyway if she only sits alone?" Jasmine asked.

"I don't know. Maybe it's the only opportunity she has to leave her house." Brock replied.

"You have to feel sorry for her, though. We have families and friends. She's all alone." Misty said.

"You're right, Misty." Gary said.

"However it can't be helped. I mean she never really had any childhood friends." Will said.

"That and her parents both died in the great Saffron City fire." Lorelei added. Meanwhile Sabrina had been listening in. Any mention of that fateful night always made her want to cry. However, since she had no emotions, that was something she just couldn't do.

"Why did they have to bring that up? They know it pains me to even hear the words 'Saffron City' and 'fire' in the same sentence." she said to herself. Lance walked up to her.

"You okay, Sabrina?" he asked.

"Not really. Lorelei just brought up the Saffron City fire." she said.

"Ah. Sorry." he said. He hugged Sabrina in an extremely futile attempt to get her to lighten up even a little. Then he went to see the others.

"The way she acts, it's obvious she's probably going to be alone all her life." Lt. Surge said.

"She's probably going to die alone, too." Falkner said.

"Damn them." Sabrina cursed to herself. That night she went to bed and started thinking.

"(Falkner and Surge are right. I'll never have anyone to even call a friend. Am I destined to be lonely forever?)" she thought. Just then something came back to her. It was an old and forgotten memory of her early childhood. "(Delia, of course! She could probably help me a little. But where did she live again? Pallet City, I think. It's been too long since I last saw her.)" she thought. Then she went to sleep, planning what she was going to do.

The next day she awoke and headed to see someone she hadn't seen since she left to start her Pokémon journey at seven years old. She drove to Pallet and went to a semi-familiar house. She then knocked on the door.

"I hope she still lives here." Sabrina said to herself. A youngish woman with moderate lengh red hair answered.

"Yes?" she asked.

"Delia?" Sabrina asked.

"Yes, that's me. What do you want?" she said.

"Miss Ketchum, don't you remember me?" Sabrina asked.

"Sabrina? Is that you?" Delia asked.

"Yes." she said. She wanted to smile at seeing her old babysitter and guardian, but of course she couldn't.

"Come in, my dear." Delia said. Sabrina went inside the small house which was walking distance from Prof. Oak's lab and Gary's house. "So what brings you here?" Delia asked Sabrina.

"Not much. I was just wondering if you could help me..." Sabrina said.

"Me help a Gym Leader? Heh heh. That's interesting." Delia said.

"I'm serious." she said.

"Well first could you get off of that monotone voice? Is that a joke or something?" Delia said.

"No. I've been like this ever since....." Sabrina said, trailing off before she could say words that were more or less forbidden from her vocabulary.

"My poor dear, I had forgotten. I'm sorry, Sabrina." Delia said.

"It's nothing, really. I was just hoping perhaps you could help me regain my emotions. I don't want to be so cold forever." the Psychic said.

"We'll see." Delia said. She went to another room and got a tape labelled 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?'. "This always gets me laughing. We'll start there." she said. After watching the tape for about 10 minutes, a smile began to appear on Sabrina's normally deathly serious face. Soon she actually was laughing at the jokes, the hoedowns, the skits, everything.

"I don't believe it! I...I'm laughing!" Sabrina yelled. She was slowly beginning to feel other emotions seep in as well.

"The rest should follow. You know, I've always heard that laughter is the best medicine but I didn't know it worked in practice." Delia said.

"Thank you, Delia!" Sabrina said. She hugged Delia and left. She headed home, now a completely different person.

Another year blurred by and once again it came time for the annual reunion. This time Sabrina was actually happy to go.

"Hello, everyone." she said, smiling.

"Is that really Sabrina?" Clair asked. Chuck went over to the blue-haired Psychic.

"Alright, who are you and what have you done to Sabrina?" Chuck said. He then got sent across the room by a Psychic attack.

"That's her, all right." Bruno said. Everyone but Chuck laughed at that sight.

"It's nice to see you've finally cheered up. What did it?" Gary said.

"None of your business. I don't discuss my personal matters with you guys." she said.

"You've never done it with anybody, Sabrina." Janine said. Sabrina gave her a dirty look and Janine knew to back off before getting a dose of Psychic herself.

"Do you think we were wrong?" Falkner asked Lt. Surge about what they had said last year.

Two months passed after that. Sabrina was still a happy person. Problem was that she was still lonely. This upset her.

"What's the point of being so happy if there's no one around to be happy with? I think I need a boyfriend." she said. And with that she went out, bought a rather nice blue dress, and went off looking for someone. In desperation she even went to a singles bar where she ran into a "friend".

"Brock? What are you doing here?" Sabrina asked.

"Sabrina!? Uh...Why are you here?" Brock asked, somewhat nervously.

"I think we both know the answer to that." Sabrina said. She, like Brock many times, bombed out that night.

The next month, Sabrina again looked for a way to end her loneliness. However now she was really desperate. She wanted a child around to cheer her up. Since she couldn't be a babysitter and there was no way she was even going to get a guy to even go out with her, she was desperate enough to get herself artificially inseminated. (That's definitely as desperate as one can get.)

"Well, at least I won't be alone. I'll also have someone who I can help in the future..." Sabrina said.

At the reunion, Sabrina showed up with her child. The others had...interesting reactions.

"That's your kid!?" half of everyone said.

"Are you insane!?" the other half asked.

"No. I just didn't want to be lonely. Also I like being a mother." Sabrina said.

"You're only 19!" Bugsy said.

"This from a 12 year old. Age is irrelevant. I became a Gym Leader at seven and you didn't hear me complain." Sabrina said. "Anyway I think I'm going to be a great mother." she added. Lance walked up.

"Uh, Sabrina. I don't mean to be rude or anything but you can't raise the child how you plan and be a Gym Leader." he said.

"What about Clair and Lorelei?" Sabrina asked.

"The thing is that they have husbands." Gary said. He got hit hard by a Psychic attack.

"You can either be the mother you want to be or a Gym Leader. You can't have both. And unfortunately Gym Leading isn't a profession you can mix and match this stuff with." Lance said.

"Uh..." Sabrina said. She was at a loss for words. On one hand, she still wanted to be a Gym Leader and possibly Psychic Pokémon Master. On the other, she wanted to care for her daughter as much as she could. "I...I quit, then." Sabrina said, shocking everyone. She then teleported away to her car and drove back to Saffron. "(Oh how could I have been such a fool? This was all a big mistake!)" Sabrina thought. She now felt lonelier than ever as the people she could count on were now out of her life. "(Well, the child's not a mistake. I love her. But she has cost me my job, and I loved being a Gym Leader. I was better off cold and emotionless. No, I was better off expecting. That was nice. No, I was better off happy, but lonely. No, I was never better off at all! All of my life has been a mistake. And now...I pay the price.)" she thought. She reached home, but did something peculiar. She wrote a note and grabbed her child's carseat. She then put both the note and her child in it and teleported to Pallet, where she left it at a particular doorstep and knocked before teleporting away back to her home, where something bad was certainly going to happen.

"Huh? Who's there?" Delia asked. She noticed the child. "Who are you?" she asked. She then noticed the note that read:

Dear Delia,

Thank you for all of your help but I've realized something that I just cannot say in this letter. This is my daughter. Please take care of her for me.

-Sabrina

PS: Don't try looking for me. By the time you've finished reading, I'll be gone (and I don't necessarily mean physically).
"Oh dear." Delia said. She went to the phone and got the phone book. "Let's see... Indigo Plateau... Ah! Here we are." she said. She dialed the number. Lance picked up.

"Hello. Master Lance here." he said.

"This is Delia Ketchum." she said.

"And what do you want, Miss Ketchum?" Lance asked.

"It's about one of your Gym Leaders, Sabrina." Delia said.

"Sorry. She quit this afternoon." Lance said.

"Well I suggest you search her house and all of Kanto because I've got her daughter and a very disturbing note from her." Delia said, somewhat frantically.

"What!? Well we'll check." Lance said. Sure enough, just hours later, they found a rather gruesome sight at Sabrina's house. They found her, dead. She, in her sadness over never getting her life right, had slit her wrists. And to make sure some psychic failsafe wouldn't save her, she also shot herself in the head. Where she got the gun, no one knew. However it had done a good job of destroying the inside of her head while the outside remained relatively intact.

"Oh my God." Delia said, looking at Sabrina.

"I don't believe it." Misty said.

"Neither do I." most of the other GLs and Elites said.

"We found this on her, too." Officer Jenny said. It was another note.

Dear Delia and Lance,

I couldn't take the thought of not being a Gym Leader anymore. That and I never, ever got my life as it should. I was never better off at any time. Therefore I decided to spare myself any more mistakes and end it all. I'm sorry for the trouble I have caused and the grief I will cause.

PS: Delia, I forgot to say that my daughter's name was Sara in my last note. Please take care of her like you tried to do with me.
"What a sad ending to the career of one of our strongest Gym Leaders." Agatha said.

"I guess we were right. She did die alone." Lt. Surge told Falkner.

"What an awful sight..." Whitney said.

"And I thought I was going to be the first of us to go." Pryce said.

"Obviously you weren't." Blaine said.

"I liked her, personally. She had what it took to be an Elite." Karen said.

Time went on. Things were never the same for the Gym Leaders, Elites, or Delia. They all now carried a sadness in their hearts as someone they respected most, in her sadness, had done away with herself. However it didn't end there. There were reports of strange occurences in the Saffron Metropolis Gym. Sometimes the temperature inside would drop to 40-50 degrees even with the A/C off in the summer and the heat on full blast in the winter. There was an aura around the place that made even Ghost-Type and Dark-Type Pokémon not want to go anywhere near it. It was eventually closed down and sealed up. However inside, standing where she used to, was Sabrina's spirit. She stood there forever. She was eternally cold, eternally lonely, and could only experience one emotion: sorrow. There was a void where her heart once was. However, somewhere in her, there was a slight hope. Hope that her daughter would bring some honor back to her family's name. However that was never going to happen, and Sabrina knew it. Delia had actually adopted little Sara, and therefore wasn't hers anymore. She was truly all alone. She spent almost every moment of her afterlife crying, thinking about all she had left behind and all of the mistakes she had made. She regretted it all, and often wished she hadn't been born in the first place. However now she had sealed her own fate. She was doomed to forever feel sorrow and to forever be lonely, even though that's not what she wanted. She felt chained to the gym where she stood. She gave up what she enjoyed, being a Gym Leader, for what she loved most: her daughter. However her loneliness for losing the other Gym Leaders made her give it all up.

"If only someone would have actually become my friend so many years ago... Like anyone would." she often said to herself. "Now...I have nothing whatsoever."

The End

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It Doesn't Matter

It was a cool autumn day. Two people were walking through the park between Goldenrod Metropolis and Ecruteak City. One had blue hair and wore a red shirt, a yellow jacket, and white pants. The other was in silver armor and had his arm around the other.

"Aren't the colors of the leaves beautiful?" Sabrina asked, admiring the now colorful trees.

"Yeah. They are." the guy in armor said.

"Ash? Is something wrong?" Sabrina asked.

"Not really." Ash said. "I've just been thinking about things, that's all." he continued.

"Your armor again, huh? You're smart. One day you may just figure out how to get rid of it." she said.

"Yeah. Even if I have to tear it off piece by piece, I'll get rid of this thing." he said. He sighed. He was preoccupied with other things.

"Well..." Sabrina said. She pulled off the helmet and ran her hand through his hair. "...this is a start." she said, kissing him.

That night Ash looked up at the stars and thought.

"(Why? Why did I have to get stuck with this thing? I don't know enough about it to start to do anything with it except fight. Well, this armor does have its better uses.)" Ash thought. He remembered one occasion where he used the Water-Type form of his armor to stop a forest fire from roasting Viridian. "(But...unfortunately there are things that I want that I just can't have in this metal suit. I want Sabrina to see the real me; what's trapped in this thing. I want to be able to hold her without worrying about crushing her because of this armor's strength. There's so much I want. But...I guess I'll never have that.)" he thought, crying a little. He headed back inside Sabrina's house, which is where he was staying. He looked at Sabrina who was sleeping peacefully from outside her room. "I'm sorry, but you don't deserve to have a machine for someone so dear to you. Goodbye, my love. We may meet again someday, but we will most likely never be together again." he said. He packed up all of his stuff and, as he left, he kissed Sabrina. "A goodbye kiss." he whispered. He then left. Once he was outside of Saffron Metropolis, he pulled out a small box with a ring in it. "I originally wanted to ask you to marry me tonight, but...why should I when I'm not as I really should be? You need someone who isn't made of metal, someone who is pure flesh and blood, unlike me. Also...there is a side of me you haven't seen and I hope you never will: my Dark-Type side. What would happen if it were to ever get out again? I'd wind up hurting you or worse." he said, looking back. "It's better this way, even if it does hurt." he continued. He made his way west, back to Pallet City. "My old home... She'd check here first so I'd better not stick around long. I know where I could probably stay." he said to himself. He headed further west, to an area between Pallet and New Bark. He found a structure. "The gateway to The PokéMasters. I never thought I'd use this again." he said. He stepped through and arrived at a place he was at not too long ago. Everything was still pretty much the same. "This was and is a nice place. I guess it'll be home now. I can always return to the ASB league. That was fun." he said.

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Back in Saffron Metropolis, Sabrina was going to be in for a bad surprise. "Ash?" she said. She looked around and found his stuff gone. "Huh?" She found a note left behind.

Dear Sabrina,

I'm truly sorry for what I have to say here. I'm afraid it's over. You deserve someone human, unlike me. You don't deserve someone who can't give you everything you could want and need. I doubt we'll see each other again, but you never know. Goodbye, Sabrina. It's been fun.

Sincerely,
Ash

PS: Please don't be sad. It's for the best.
"Ash? Why? We were so happy together. I guess that armor of his just got him down. But...with or without armor, I still love him. So why...?" she said. "I guess he doesn't believe himself to be human anymore. I don't blame him. Being stuck in that metal suit for over two years would probably make someone believe that, too. But I still love him." she continued.

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Back at TPM, Ash had rejoined a Pokémon league he was in temporarily in the past. Now he decided this was going to be a permanent tenure.

"Pokémon battles are the only things that can keep my mind off of Sabrina right now." he said to himself one day. He eventually ran into an old friend of his.

"Hey Ash. Where's Sabrina at?" Prof. Jb Wolf asked.

"Back at home." Ash said in a depressed tone.

"Why? Also why are you so down?" Prof. asked.

"I...It's pretty much over. It's just not right for her to end up with a monster like me." he said.

"A monster? You mean the armor, huh?" Prof. said. "That's no reason to break up, though. When you two were here last, you seemed inseparable. What happened?" he asked.

"Something just clicked. I just figured I'd be in this metal suit forever and I didn't want her to not be able to know me as I used to be." Ash said. He sighed. "I wish that Gyarados had finished me off when it blasted me. That way I could have spared her the suffering this caused for her." he continued.

"True, but without you she'd still be cold and emotionless." Prof. said.

"Either way, she's better off without me." Ash said. (Author's note: I don't think so.)

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Back in Saffron, Sabrina was taking a nice walk outside.

"I feel so lonely now that Ash is gone. I know why Ash left, but I think that was a hasty and foolish decision. I wouldn't have minded talking to him about it." she said. She then heard something. "Huh? Is anyone there?" she asked. Nothing. She heard noises again and saw some blob-like shapes. The street lights revealed their identity: a bunch of Grimers. "You think you can scare me? Alakazam, go!" she said, throwing a Pokéball containing her strongest Pokémon. "Psychic!" she said. The Grimers didn't know what hit them. "Good. Return." she said, recalling the powerful Psychic-Type. She didn't notice something lurking behind her. "Huh?" she said. She turned around just in time to be Body Slammed by a Muk. Sabrina's cries for help were muffled by the Pokémon on top of her. When the poisonous Pokémon left, it left Sabrina in very bad shape. Parts of her clothes had been dissolved by the toxic acid and she had several burns also caused by it. She coughed up some of a purple ooze. She had actually ingested some of the Muk's toxic waste.

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Back at TPM, a battle was waging atop the ASB tower.

"Alakazam, Hyper Beam!" Ash yelled to his Pokémon. The attack struck the other trainer's Rhydon.

"Horn Drill!" another trainer said to his Pokémon.

"Teleport!" Ash yelled. The Alakazam zapped away from the blast, but Ash neglected to notice which way the charging Pokémon was headed for. It slammed into him and the Rhydon's horn went right through him, putting a decent sized hole in his chest. "(So my curse is over. But will I ever see Sabrina again in the afterlife?)" Ash thought as he was sent flying by the impact. He wound up flying off the tower. However he was dead before he hit the ground.

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At the hospital in Saffron, things weren't doing well for Sabrina. Someone had noticed the Muk attack but she was in bad shape. Lance, Karen, Misty, and Erika were with her.

"So...will she live?" Misty asked.

"I don't know. I hope so. She was a great Gym Leader." Karen said.

"Since she opened up and let her emotions out, she's been a good friend." Erika said.

"Thanks for...the kind words." Sabrina said, weakly. "I wish...Ash was here...with me." she continued.

"I hate to break this to you, Sabrina. Especially at a time like this." Lance said.

"What?" Sabrina asked.

"There was some accident and Ash is dead. I'm sorry." he continued.

"Really?" Sabrina asked, starting to cry.

"Don't cry, Sabrina. Save your strength." Erika said.

"I...can't...help it." Sabrina said, growing weaker. Just then she thought she saw someone. He was wearing a black shirt, a blue jacket, blue jeans, and white sneakers. She recognized his face. "Ash?" she asked.

"Come on, Sabrina. Your parents are waiting for you. So am I." Ash, or at least his spirit, said.

"My...parents...?" Sabrina said.

"Sabrina?" Lance asked. Just then the monotone sound coming from the heart monitor hooked up to Sabrina filled the room. "Oh no." he said.

"She's gone." Erika said.

"Well at least she's with those she loved." Misty said.

In a vast field (Heaven), Sabrina and Ash were hugging one another.

"I guess we weren't meant to be apart." Sabrina said.

"Yeah, but like this?" Ash said.

"Forget it, Ash. This is not your fault. Now I admit this wasn't what I had in mind when I thought I'd be with you forever, but this isn't bad. At least now I get to see what you really look like. Just as I imagined, too." Sabrina said.

"Whatever. Just as long as you're happy. And...now that I look back, it didn't matter at all if I had my armor or not. I was just being silly." Ash said.

The End

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To be continued...